How to Write a Resume for an Administrative Job

Your resume for an administrative job must present you as an exceptional, reliable and highly skilled person in a supportive role. Your resume and cover letter must stand out in overall impact and in neatness, organization, grammar and spelling. They will be used to audition your skills and attention to detail as an example of what your work will look like in the new position that you are seeking.

Instructions

1. Provide your contact information in a bold heading at the top of your resume. Include your name, telephone, email address and personal mailing address.

2. Demonstrate throughout the resume and cover letter that you have the clear, succinct writing skills that many employers seek in an administrative hire. Limit the resume to a single page and use bulleted sentence fragments that begin with strong action words that get attention.

3. Make your resume easy to find online by giving it some keyword muscle, but make sure that the keywords you use apply directly to you. Strong keywords may include titles of software that you use in your work as well as various job titles that might be applied to you, including office manager, executive assistant or receptionist.

4. Write a "Current Career Objective" of one to two lines that clearly states the position you are seeking, preferably in language that corresponds to the job as advertised or posted.

5. Use strong action words such as "supervised," "managed" and "organized" under the heading of "Professional Experience" to provide brief impact statements for each of the last 3 jobs you have held, with the title, employer and years worked for each job.

6. Make the "Professional Experience" as relevant as possible to the specific job you are seeking, and include unrelated jobs or positions further back than your last 3 to 5 jobs only if they say something distinctive about what you can bring to the new position.

7. Create a "Computer and Equipment Skills" section, if applicable, with a bulleted list of software programs and hardware you have used, including non-computer office equipment that may be relevant to the specific job you are seeking and special skills such as desktop publishing and presentation layout.

8. List your educational achievements, including degrees, diplomas and related coursework, under the heading of "Education."

9. Write a brief "Personal" section that describes you professionally without specifying age, race, gender or marital status.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't burden this resume for an administrative job with your long-term career goals or your dreams of writing a novel or playing Carnegie Hall. Many employers are focused on keeping things simple and are skittish about managing the expectations of support employees who they want to value for reliability and performance in the specific job posted.